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Diego pulls apart cloud and infrastructure invoices line by line so you can see where the money actually goes before the bill lands.
Auth0's free tier is 25,000 MAU, but the moment a real app needs one paid feature the meter starts near $0.07 per user. A numbers-first 2026 teardown across four app profiles, with the SSO wall and cheaper alternatives priced out.
Supabase Pro is $25 in 2026, but a growing SaaS paid $333 in a real month. A numbers-first 30-day bill across four cohorts, with compute, MAU, and egress itemized.
Three real 30-day Claude Code bills, the 5.5x token-efficiency math, and when the $200 Max plan beats the API.
A 1,500 customer SaaS shipped AI features and watched gross margin fall from 81% to 47%. We walk three pricing ladders and the COGS math that got it back to 73% in 8 weeks.
The sticker price per token is the smallest line in your LLM bill. Once you add retries, embeddings, vector reads, orchestration, and the platform margin, a "simple" agent workflow lands around $0.42 per run, roughly 4× the raw model cost. This breakdown shows where the money actually goes and which three levers cut a workflow bill the fastest without touching quality.
